Music

Monday, November 11, 2013

There’s one explicit reference to The Wizard of Oz in Martin Scorsese’s bleak 1985 farce After Hours, based on a script by Joseph
Minion, a movie which was made on the rebound after the director’s first
well-publicized attempts to finance a film of The Last Temptation of Christ fell apart. The movie Scorsese did end
up shooting isn’t set on anything like Technicolor over-the-rainbow real estate,
or even the skuzzy neon-lit urban hellscape of Taxi Driver. Instead, it takes place on the streets of an ominously
under-populated bohemia, Soho as an abandoned studio back lot, a concrete,
rain-drenched garden of Gethsemane where gloomy pit stops like the Terminal Bar
seem to offer comfort but lead only to convolution, misunderstanding and
betrayal.

In the wake of his
frustration over Last Temptation,
it’s not difficult to imagine what appealed to Scorsese about Minion’s
premise—set during the late/early hours of one nightmarish New York City night,
complacent yuppie Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) impulsively pursues a date with
Marcy (Rosanna Arquette), a woman whom he meets in a coffee shop. Their
tentative relationship starts off well enough, gets inexplicably weirder and then
ripples into ever-increasingly disastrous consequences, ending in a rebirth (of
sorts) for Paul, but precious little catharsis. Paul, like the Scorsese who
found himself with this movie navigating a dark, ostensibly farcical narrative,
seems out of his comfort zone immediately. During a careening cab ride downtown
toward his late-night rendezvous with Marcy, all of Paul’s money (a single $20
bill) ends up flying out the cab window, leaving him cashless (and apparently
credit card-less), at the mercy of the various whimsical and inexplicable
influences that will shape his rough journey down the rabbit/sewer hole as he
tries to make it back to something like home.

On the surface, After
Hours feels like a lark, though a particularly joyless one which offer few tension-relieving
laughs. It has, however, an enviable cast, headed by Griffin Dunne, who manages
to carry the movie while barely displaying an impulse that isn’t either whiny
or self-serving. Terrific character actors like Fiorentino, John Heard and
Verna Bloom make their own impressions, but the movie is highlighted by a pair
of not-exactly-lethal blondes who exact sweet, squirming revenge on Paul for
his various trespasses.

Catherine O’Hara shows up late, and very happily, as an
ice cream truck driver who heads up a mob which mistakenly pegs Paul as a
serial thief. But it’s Teri Garr as a disgruntled bipolar waitress (“I have
trouble figuring the taxes on checks! So what??!!”) who fixates on Paul and gives
off the movie’s best comic buzz. Garr’s impeccable timing was largely taken for
granted during the ‘70s and ‘80s, so her brief, fizzy appearance makes
revisiting this movie worth the wait. (Stoner icons Cheech Marin and Tommy
Chong also pop up as the real burglars, less organic to Soho’s Spring Street
than they were making a similar cameo appearance on the Laurel Canyon Boulevard
of Joni Mitchell’s 1972 Court and Spark
album.)

If After Hours is
on one level an expression of Scorsese’s sundry frustrations, then it must also
be considered in the light of the derailed career of its screenwriter.
According to Vanity Fair contributing
editor Andrew Hearst it was hinted, in a 2000 profile of NPR monologist Joe
Frank for Salon-- but never reported
on in the industry trades during the production or after the release of the
film-- that Joseph Minion, whose script for After
Hours was presented to Scorsese by producers Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson,
plagiarized many of the details in the film’s first half hour from Frank’s 1982
monologue Lies. Frank apparently
sued, and successfully. (Hearst briefly documented the history of the
circumstances in 2008 on his personal blog.)

Minion went on to
write the inventive screenplay for one of Nicolas Cage’s most notorious films, Vampire’s Kiss (1988), but he has worked
only sporadically since then. Is it only coincidence that the character of Paul
carries throughout the movie’s second half a very real sense of guilt resulting
from the tragic fate of another character, or that there is also a competing theme
of Paul’s assumed guilt and pursuit by
a neighborhood vigilante group over burglaries which he did not commit? Now seen in the light of the
movie’s possible meaning for both its primary creators, what once struck me as
an unsettling scenario realized by a director who may have approached
it as career filler now feels more personal than ever. As a coffee shop owner
played by Dick Miller says when Paul and Marcy finally step out into the Soho
night together, “Different rules apply when it gets this late. You know what I
mean? It’s, like, after hours.”

********************************************

After Hours plays the 2013 AFI Fest in Los Angeles on Wednesday, November 13, 11:00 p.m. at the Egyptian Theater as one of the featured selections of AFI Fest Guest Artistic Director Agnes Varda. ********************************************

I've always felt a little closed out by it too, B.D.S., which is why I think I was grateful to discover the anecdote about Minion-- it contextualized the movie in a way that made sense and made it more interesting to write about. My favorite Scorsese movies wouldn't include this one--they are Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, New York New York, Italian/American and The Last Temptation of Christ. I also look forward to seeing The King of Comedy again (I haven't in about 25 years) because I suspect it has aged rather well.

It seems like it must have been a kind of Street Smart situation, with Minion ransacking that monologue for a script that just wasn’t coming together. And instead of getting the B+ he’s hoping for, he gets an agent, he gets a deal, he gets a movie. Every step makes discovery more and more likely and the consequences of coming clean more and more awful. If the financing had fallen through, if this or that key player had pulled out, if the studio brass had been replaced at the right moment and the movie ended up in turnaround hell, would anyone have ever had any reason to wonder about the sources of one more unmade movie? Would he have 30 credits on his imdb page instead of half a dozen?